Proaza, Asturias, Spain, 1-8 September 2006

Conveners: Julian Wiethold and Leonor Peña Chocarro

Within the framework of the ESF Programme ‘Early Agricultural Remnants and Technical Heritage’ (EARTH), a Summer School is being offered for fifteen students studying in European countries. The participants will be chosen by an EARTH Selection Committee. An important aim of the Summer School is to bring together young researchers in order to enable them to make links to other researchers across Europe. The scientific goals are indicated in item 1 below. The lecturers and the participants will be hosted together in Proaza, Asturias, Spain, and will take their meals together in order to allow also informal contacts beyond the classes. The language of the Summer School will be English.

Students must commit themselves to attend all lectures and practical work, and to stay for the full five days. EARTH will pay all food and accommodation costs, and travel costs up to a maximum of 500 euros.

1. Learning outcomes:

By the end of the summer school, students will be able to:

· demonstrate an understanding of a social, human-centred approach in investigating nonindustrial agriculture

· integrate a range of disciplinary approaches (especially archaeobotany, ethnography, and archaeology)

· show a basic understanding of the main practical, archaeological and scientific techniques required for investigating non-industrial agriculture

2. Lecturers:

Patricia Anderson (France)
Karoline Daugstad (Norway)
Leonor Peña Chocarro (Spain)
Thomas K. Schippers (France)
Julian Wiethold (Germany)
Lydia Zapata (Spain)

3. Topics of the lectures

The participants will be asked to attend all the lectures and to take part in all the activities. All the following topics will be taught:

· Principles of archaeobotany

· Ethnography

· Landscape geography

· Landscape archaeology and agriculture

· Experimentation and ethnoarchaeology: analysis of the function of agricultural tools

4. Practical sessions

As well as the formal lecture sessions, all the participants will take part in practical experiences such as the harvest and the crop processing sequence of hulled wheats, or the recording of the weed flora of the fields and villages. An excursion to the highlands will focus on seasonality in resource use related to transhumance such as patterns of land use and building style, and the organisation of different work tasks in the transhumance system. Other activities, in coordination with local scholars and/or ethnographic institutions, include the study of agrarian tools and local storage facilities, and some individual enquiries and data producing. A small internal colloquium will be organised during the Summer School. Every participant is asked to give a 15-minute presentation (preferably with PowerPoint) of his/her research work (Masters thesis, doctoral project, finished dissertation etc).

5. Procedure

· Travel grants as well as accommodation and meals will be provided for a maximum of fifteen successful applicants, who will be accommodated in double rooms.

· The grantees have to pre-pay their travel expenses, which will be refunded up to a maximum of 500 euros

· To be refunded, the grantees have to send to the ESF, within one month after the end of the Summer School, a one-page scientific report, a signed host statement form(s), and the original travel tickets.

The grants do not cover any insurance, either for the travel, or for the personal cover. The participants will be asked to prove that they have their own personal liability insurance for the time they spend in the Summer School. They are requested to have a valid antitetanic (tetanus) vaccination.

6. Biographies of the lecturers

Patricia C. Anderson obtained her doctorate in Quaternary Geology and Prehistory at the University of Bordeaux in 1981. She works at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in Valbonne, France, on agricultural tools (microwear analysis) and phytolith remains involved in plant processing, from Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze age sites in the Near East. Her work concerns harvesting and threshing, with particular attention to the threshing sledge. She has been conducting experiments on harvesting and threshing with such tools in Southern France over the past 15 years in order to better identify these techniques in archaeological contexts, and to understand how they function. Also to this end, she carries out ethnoarchaeological investigation into these techniques, with their related tools and plant remains in Southern Syria and Northern Tunisia.

Karoline Daugstad finished her PhD in human geography at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, in 2000. The title of the doctoral dissertation is ‘Between Romanticism and Realism: The Summer Farm Landscape as Ideal and Reality’, focusing on landscape representations and landscape histories especially related to the agricultural system of seterbruk (a form of transhumance) in the highlands of Norway: how landscape ideals are created, how ideals change or persist and what effect these ideals have on various actors are central topics in her research. Daugstad is also doing research addressing the use, conservation and management of landscapes ranging from cultural heritage objects to national parks. Another field of study concerns to the multifunctionality of agriculture.

Leonor Peña-Chocarro received a BA in Prehistory and Archaeology at the Universidad Autonoma Madrid (1988) and a MSc in Archaeology (Archaeobotany option) and a PhD (1995) at the Institute of Archaeology, London. She has worked several years at the Museum of Como (Italy) where she has participated in several projects. She is currently working as a researcher at the Laboratorio de Arquebotanica of the CSIC (the Spanish High Council for Scientific Research) in Madrid. Her archaeobotanical work has concentrated into both prehistoric and historic periods in Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Syria, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Her ethnographic work has focused into the study of hulled wheat (einkorn, emmer, and spelt) cultivation in areas of Spain and Morocco and the role of minor legumes such as Lathyrus sativus and L. cicera. Her main interests are prehistoric farming, particularly the origins of agriculture in the Mediterranean area, the application of ethnographic models in archaeobotany, and the role of minor crops in both prehistoric times and in the present-day.

Thomas K. Schippers has studied anthropology and ethnology in France at the Université de Provence in Aix en Provence and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (PhD 1983). He has done fieldwork in the south of France, the Italian Alps French Guyana and recently near the Portuguese-Spanish border. His research interest range from ethno-sciences and ecology, the study of local identities in France to the methods and concepts of European ethnology. He has been teaching anthropology and ethnology at various levels and to various audiences since 1984 in France, Slovenia and Austria. At present he is a researcher at the Institut d'Ethnologie Méditerranéenne et Comparative (IDEMEC) in Aix en Provence (France). His research related publications include numerous articles and the following books Temps perçus, temps vécus (CNRS, Paris 1986), Le traitement des récoltes (with P. Anderson and B. Simonel, Antibes, 2004), and Europe Educational Histories of European Social Anthropology (with D. Drackle and I. Edgar, Berghahn, Oxford, 2003). Besides his fieldwork-based research of rural techniques and gestures and technological choices, he is presently engaged in more theoretical research concerning the role of human limits and delimitations in the production of knowledge in what he has termed the 'fractal nature of facts' and their social implications in regard to categories, borders and boundaries.

Julian Wiethold studied Pre- and Protohistory, Botany and Geology at the Universities of Kiel and Marburg, Germany. In 1997 he finished his PhD in natural sciences at the Institute of Pre- and Protohistory, University of Kiel. In his thesis he investigated the late Holocene vegetation history of eastern Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. In 1998/99 he worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre archéologique européen du Mont Beuvray, France. His research project focused on late Celtic and Gallo-Roman agriculture and plant use. A two-year employment at the palynological division of the Albrecht von Haller Institut für Pflanzenwissenschaften, University of Göttingen, allowed a study of the late glacial vegetation history of the Neuwied basin, based on the pollen evidence and on subfossil plant remains. Now he is employed by INRAP (Institut National de Recherches Archéologiques Préventives) to perform archaeobotanical analysis on medieval plant remains from rescue excavations on the track of the TGV-Est in the Lorraine region. His main research interests are Holocene vegetation history, agriculture and the use of plants during all prehistoric and historic periods, especially changes caused by cultural influences.

Lydia Zapata-Peña received a BA in History and Archaeology at the University of Deusto (Bilbao, 1988) and an MSc in Archaeobotany at the Institute of Archaeology (UCL, London, 1992). She obtained her PhD at the University of the Basque Country (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain), studying prehistoric agriculture from Northern Iberia and human impact on the landscape through the analysis of plant macroremains (seeds and wood charcoal). She held a two-year post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, studying hunter-gatherer plant exploitation from archaeological remains. She has worked at the CSIC (the Spanish High Council for Scientific Research) in Madrid, and currently is a researcher and lecturer at the University of the Basque Country (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain). Her main interests are the history of early agriculture, human impact on the landscape, and ethnoarchaeology.

Participants